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Mapping Out a Museum Crawl

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Tackling Museum Season

Tackling Museum Season

CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

There are several ways to organize your exhibition-hopping this season. There is that old standby, the grand tour of blockbusters and sentimental favorites: El Greco on the 400th anniversary of his death; an unusual gathering of Egon Schiele portraits at the Neue Gallery in New York; and the unveiling of Leonard Lauder’s extraordinary collection of cubist works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

You could instead pick a theme. Survey contemporary museum design, for instance, by visiting newly completed expansions and renovations at the Sculpture Center in Queens, the Baltimore Museum of Art and Harvard University’s three art museums.

Another option is to focus on a single medium like photography with shows that feature masters like the American photographer Paul Strand, the South Africans Ernest Cole and Jo Ratcliffe, the Brazilian Sebastião Salgado or the Frenchman Marc Riboud.

For those with a taste for nostalgia, there are several shows devoted to postwar rebellions and experimentation. The German group Zero, which aimed to transform art in the 1950s and ’60s, is featured at the Guggenheim; a celebration of Sixties radicalism organized by the artist and guest curator Nicolás Dumit Estéve is at el Museo del Barrio; while a taste of art that sprang from the urban upheavals roiling New York, Los Angeles and Chicago in the ’60s and ’70s can be found at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Internationalism and cultural exchanges are watchwords of our age, but the original globalization occurred more than 3,000 years ago when ancient kingdoms began trading and traveling across the Mediterranean. Ideas and materials, art and technology were carried in ship hulls and by caravans that journeyed across what today comprises Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and part of Turkey.

This commercial traffic not only helped animate the long-dead civilizations of the first millennium B.C. but serve as the wellspring of our own culture.

“Assyria to Iberia” offers glimpses into this enormously inventive, transitional period when iron began to replace bronze as the primary material used for weapons and tools and the first alphabet spread through the Mediterranean world.

The exhibition, which runs until Jan. 4, brings together an astonishing collection of items from museums in Israel, Iraq, Britain, Cyprus, Spain, Armenia, and Berlin that have rarely been seen outside their homes.

It also serves as an important reminder of how vulnerable these ancient treasures still are at a time when Sunni extremists like the Islamic State (commonly referred to as ISIS) are bent on destroying centuries-old shrines, statues and religious sites in Syria and northern Iraq.

The grandeur of kings like the ninth-century Assyrian ruler Ashurnasirpal II is captured in rare cuneiform tablets and in the monumental sculptures and bas reliefs that once lined the walls of his palace-cum-arsenal in the capital of Nimrud (near modern Mosul in northern Iraq). An animated video reconstructs the enormous Northwest Palace there, putting the items on display in context and reminding viewers that despite the sometimes blanched stone sculptures and carvings we see today, ancient artists were vibrant colorists.

Extraordinary reliefs showing the battle of Til Tuba, a major Assyrian victory over Elam, a kingdom in the western and southern areas of Iran, in the seventh century covers a wall in the third gallery. The fate of the Elamite king Teumann — identifiable by his receding hairline — and his son Tammaritu is explained in captions and pictures. The realities of ancient war — beheadings, toppled vehicles, threats and large-scale killings — chillingly echo what is happening in the Middle East today.

The Assyrians’ far-reaching military conquests were followed by a more peaceable form of control —an administrative system. Finely wrought cylindrical seals — featuring Assyrian deities like Ishtar, the goddess of love and war — helped manage and document the movement of people, goods and armies in an empire that stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, the “largest empire the world has ever seen,” according to the exhibition text. These ancient bureaucrats used boards that could be filled with wax to create an erasable writing surface. Panels from a hinged board made of ivory look so easy to use, you are tempted to pick it up and compose a letter.

Ivory was a popular material for many other objects, from furniture to horse trappings, that were found at the Nimrud palaces and within another royal compound at Samaria. A plaque depicting a lion with his jaw around a young boy’s throat is evidence of what can survive through centuries of warfare and what can be lost. A nearly identical plaque, probably from the same piece of furniture, was looted from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in 2003 and has not been recovered. Another set of carved ivories discovered in 1928 at Arslan Tash in Syria illustrate the South Syrian style of carving, with its Phoenician influence.

Remnants from forgotten kingdoms like Urartu are showcased alongside the more familiar biblical civilizations. Among the relics is a fragment of a stone tablet written in Aramaic from the ninth century that the Met notes bears the only contemporaneous mention of King David outside the Bible.

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Ozymandian remains point to the grandiosity of these fallen empires, but the vibrancy of everyday life is evoked by finely wrought jewelry, combs, and glass vials that once belonged to the people that lived inside their borders.

Many of those items were carried by the Phoenicians, master seamen who sailed beyond what was considered the western bounds of human navigation, the promontories that flank the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar at the tip of the Iberian Peninsula in Spain.

Near the exhibition’s end, an otherworldly sound of water accompanies a film clip of an undersea excavation, the first of a Phoenician shipwreck. Found at Bajo de la Campana, a rock reef off Spain’s coast near Cartagena, the four tons of cargo — which included ivory tusks, amber, ostrich shells, ceramic vessels and weights — show both the extraordinary range of goods that were exchanged and the distance that they traveled.

You can remain in Spain as you rocket forward in time with the Francisco Goya exhibition “Goya: Order and Disorder” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the largest American retrospective of his work in 25 years. The range and richness of his work highlights some of the things that are absent from the art salvaged from pre-Christian societies — deep psychological insight, depictions of everyday life, the daily existence of women and children.

Goya, on the cusp of the modern world, delves deep into every aspect of Spanish life in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a time of social upheaval, war and repression. He portrayed both rulers and ruled in his long career, their flirtations and vanities, their labors and terrors, and their games and diversions from ice skating to bullfighting.

Goya was remarkably productive and experimented with all sorts of materials — painting, chalk, crayons, tapestries, lithographs, even painting on ivories, something ancient craftsmen would have appreciated. The Fine Arts museum frames the 170 works it has gathered — 21 of them from the Museo Nacional del Prado alone — around the theme of order and disorder.

It was the tightly controlled, grand portraits of Spanish aristocrats that brought Goya fame in the 1780s and 1790s. The count of Altamira was one of his major patrons, and Goya’s portraits of his family established his reputation as a master technician. One of his most memorable is of Altamara’s son, “Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga,” in which the somber looking child, outfitted in a bright red jump suit and sash, is holding the leash of a pet bird as two cats, eyes wide, keep a close watch.

Goya paid tribute to his own talent in “the Duchess of Alba.” Gazing haughtily at her onlookers, she points down to the words drawn in the ground beneath her feet, “Solo Goya” — Only Goya — as if he were the single talent worthy of such a commission. The painting is shown in conjunction with one of her husband, the Duke, the first time that the two have been shown together in more than 200 years.

In 1789, King Charles IV appointed Goya as court painter, and he immortalized the royal family and later the reign of Joseph Bonaparte. Later his commissions expanded to include religious subjects as well as actresses, businessmen, and his own family.

As the catalog notes, though, Goya had grander ambitions for his art, declaring that painting, like poetry, could offer moral commentary on “human vices and errors.” This can be seen in some of the compelling etchings that make up the “Caprichos series,” begun in 1799. “Time (Old Woman)” and “Until Death,” for example, are merciless portraits of aging vanity.

His keen eye for the worst in human nature touched on the personal and the political. He delved deep into the mind’s nightmarish landscapes, illustrating the mental torments suffered by others in “Yard With Madmen,” and himself in his famous etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”

The horrors that afflicted his countrymen during the six years of war that followed Napolean’s invasion of Spain reached a culmination with Goya’s monumental history paintings: “The Second of May, 1808,” which shows Madrid’s revolt against French troops, and “The Third of May, 1808,” which shows the executions that followed. (Sadly neither of those made it to Boston.)

But the show does include items like “What a Great Deed!” and “Charity” from the “Disasters of War” series, in which Goya offers an unblinking gaze at stripped bodies being thrown into a burial pit and strung-up corpses with severed limbs and heads.

Like the “Assyria to Iberia” show, the Goya exhibition reminds us that our culture has preserved the bloody-minded atrocities of our ancestors along with their art.

A version of this article appears in print on October 26, 2014, on Page F18 of the New York edition with the headline: Mapping Out a Museum Crawl. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe